In a call centre or multimedia contact centre the majority of communications are between users or customers of the contact centre and agents of the contact centre who interact with the customers. The interactions are normally in the form of communications sessions which can be voice calls, video calls, chat sessions, use of messaging sessions or exchanges of emails, for example.
Most contact centres also employ supervisors who monitor agent resources to ensure the smooth functioning of the contact centre. The supervisors will generally also be provided with an overview of the status of the contact centre or of agents under their control, and most contact centre technology allows a supervisor to eavesdrop on or conference into a particular communications session and to intervene if it is deemed necessary.
A problem with this scenario is that it can be difficult for a supervisor in charge of a large number of agents to determine which agents may require intervention. Normally, supervisors rely on pop-up requests on their display which are generated in response to an agent request for supervisor input. A difficulty with this is that an agent who is involved with an altercation with a customer may not want to alert the supervisor. For example, the agent may not be adhering to guidelines regarding behaviour or language and may therefore wish to conceal the altercation from the supervisor. Similarly, if an incident occurs because a customer is dissatisfied with the service received from an agent, then the agent may not wish to alert the supervisor and may prefer to try to resolve the matter himself or herself, even if this matter could be more quickly resolved by referring the customer to a supervisor or referring to the supervisor for advice.
Many experienced supervisors therefore rely not only on requests initiated by the agents, but also by monitoring the duration of a communications session. If a telephone call or chat session is unusually long, this can be an indicator of a problem warranting further investigation. This is, however, far from foolproof. An argument can develop between a customer and an agent quite quickly and a customer may hang up or log off dissatisfied. In this case the contact centre may lose a customer without there having been any record that this was due in part to the behaviour of the agent.
In addition to situations requiring intervention due to unsatisfactory communications taking place, problems arising, or an agent initiating a request for assistance, there are also cases where an agent would welcome additional information to enable the communication to be dealt with more quickly and smoothly.
Certain contact centre technologies will use call progress data (including calling line ID and interactive voice response (IVR) inputs) to generate contact-specific screen pops when an agent receives a contact. For example, if a bank customer is recognised by a bank contact centre system from the originating phone number or from an IVR login, a screen pop containing the customer's basic account information may be generated at the agent workstation when an agent is assigned the call. Such assistance is not always helpful. As an example, the customer may be making an enquiry relating to a different account other than the default account, in which the wrong details might be presented. Or the customer may be ringing to apply for a loan, in which case the agent will be concerned with the customer's credit rating as maintained by a credit bureau rather than the details of the customer's existing account(s).
It can therefore be seen that there are drawbacks with the manner in which contacts are currently supervised in contact centres. There are also problems from the point of view of agents in being provided with relevant assistance at the right time.